Twice in the night Dick rose to fling on more wood and to see the Northern Lights chasing across the sky like merry children at play. The long months at Grey Wolf had been bad for Dick. They had cramped him back into the old desires which had been too strong for him all his life. Among men he fell on men's sins instantly, and desired nothing else. But here, with the great call of the unsubdued North-West, whose colours he wore vibrating through all his senses, he paused a moment on the threshold while the stars went by, and the black pines peaked their tops to point where their feet could not follow.
Dick had no desire to follow. He had no wish to be good. But he knew, with a wide-awake, grim amusement, that the delight of bringing a certain man to justice was shortly going to be weighed against the pain of hurting a certain woman.
The North Star that the sailors love swung high in the glittering night. Dick had never kept but one star true all his days, and that was the star of his own wild will. He dropped his eyes and crept back to his skins with their rough, coarse hair and their animal smell. But they were good to Dick, for they were Nature's own way of pulling him back to the verities past all the subtle creeds of yea and nay.
On the fourth night Dick bought more whitefish at a clump of tepees on the rim of a snow-spread lake that ran to the forest lip. He gave in exchange a memorandum-form where, above his scrawled name, he had set this request: "To the Hudson Bay Company. Please pay to Kewasis Eusta the sum of two dollars, and charge to general acct."
That paper would hold good all over the North-West and the old chief knew it, folding it with stiff fingers that yet had not lost cunning at trap and trigger.
"Perhaps I go to Peace River Landing," he said. "And perhaps to St. John. Ne totam goes west?"
Dick's knowledge of Cree would not string a sentence. But his hand-language presently brought him out an interpreter; a middle-aged half-breed with tangled hair lank on his shoulders and mangy skins close to his throat. The whole camp smelt badly; it was poor and desolate, and
